Disappointed with KDE 4's performance and other shortcomings, Timothy Pearson continued KDE 3.5 development under the name Trinity. Today the first third major update of the Trinity Desktop Environment is released, providing an alternative upgrade path for KDE users who do not feel comfortable with KDE 4.

Could you please elaborate on what you don't like about the current KDE SC 4.7.2?

I know there are still some crashes that needs to be fixed, but other than that it's pretty stable. I know that because I'm currently on KDE 4.7.2 and I had Amarok crash a few times when I was using it.

And if you set "Folder View" as a desktop and revert back to the classic menu, you pretty much have the same DE that you had in KDE 3.x.

At the end of the day why make all the effort to make kde4 mimic kde3? Why not use kde3 instead? Its not supported? Enter Trinity.

There is absolutely nothing that I like in KDE4. From login to shutdown its an eyesore, disorganized, slow, and buggy. To fix this, for me, they would have to make it more or less identical to kde3. Since we already have kde3 and now a group is committed to update it, this is the fix kde4 needs.

I'd rather have a modern DE with a powerful shell that is modular and that I can tweak it as I please. AKA: Plasma.

Also, with KDE4 I have the advantage of relying in modern technologies such as Phonon (with VLC backends), Qt4 (soon Qt5 and Wayland). We're not stuck with legacy libraries like Qt3, which is the case for Trinity.

I know there are bugs left to be fixed, but those will be fixed in time, it's just a matter of time. Right now KDE SC 4.7.2 is very stable for me.